From Crying in the Garden to Selling Out in 30 Minutes

Kate Gesford farms in the mountains of Western Wyoming, where there are no frost-free days on record. The planting calendars all tell her it's impossible to grow where she lives. Yet she's the only person in her entire valley selling vegetables. When she started, longtime local farmers told her she'd never make it—that there was no market. A year ago, she was out in her garden alone, weeding and crying while listening to this podcast, coming home from the farmers market with $120 after losing money on her efforts. Today, she sells out in the first 30 minutes, with a line of customers waiting for her when she arrives. Her chicken prices went from $6 to $10 a pound with zero pushback. And her autoimmune symptoms—she came into the program with several—are completely gone.

The Mindset Shift That Changed Everything

Kate joined Charlotte's coaching program about a year ago. She had scaled up from a garden to a market garden, done coursework, read books, and interviewed other farmers. But she was stuck. The systems and weeds were manageable problems; the mindset around selling was not. "I would be out in the garden by myself, I had no help weeding, and just crying listening to your podcast," she recalls. "And that part in the intro where you say 'yes it's possible to be a farmer and make money'—I just weeped."